Homosexual couples kiss in the Plaza de la Catedral as Pope Benedict XVI travels in his popemobile to the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 7, 2010. (CNS photo/Gustau Nacarino, Reuters)

The success that
the gay community has achieved in shedding the “deviant” label has relied upon
convincing the heterosexual world that homosexual behavior is perfectly normal.
The recent uproar over a social work course titled “Deviant Behavior” at
Franciscan University of Steubenvillewhich lists homosexuality as a form of
deviant behaviordemonstrates just how vigilant the gay community remains in
confronting anyone who might suggest that homosexual behavior could be anything
but normal. It also shows how difficult it is for faithful Catholic
institutions to teach students what the Church says about the nature of
homosexual acts.

The dispute at the
Steubenville, Ohio university emerged when two graduates both members of the
Franciscan Gay Alumni and Allies Facebook groupissued a press release
complaining about the course description, which lists homosexuality as a form
of deviant behavior. The group has demanded that the university revise its
course descriptions “to stop contributing to the culture of hate and
ignorance.” According to press reports, the alumni also encouraged other
Facebook group members to contact the social work accrediting agency to
investigate the matter and to contact the university. In an interview with
National Public Radio, Stephen Holloway, the director of the office of
accreditation at the Council on Social Work Education, said the course
description was a matter of concern. “The fact that homosexuality was
identified in the course description as deviant behavior raises a flag,” said
Holloway. “Understanding diversity and difference and their dynamics in society
[are] critical for social workers to be effective in working with diverse
populations.” The Council’s Commission for Diversity and Social and Economic
Justice houses a council on sexual orientation and gender identity which works
for the “full participation of individuals who are gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, or two-spirit in social work education.” Further, the Council
requires that social work education “advance human rights and social and
economic justice.”

For any social work
programespecially a social work program at a faithful Catholic college like
Franciscanthere is a challenge in defining “social justice” for individuals
who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or two-spirit. For those outside
the Church, social justice may demand access to marriage for same-sex couples. But,
for faithful Catholics, social justice demands that the teachings of the Church
be followed. The Catechism of the
Catholic Church requires that homosexual persons be treated with “respect,
compassion, and sensitivity” (2358). Yet Catholic teachings also maintain that
homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” (2357). Whether that teaching will be viewed as a
violation of the rights of homosexual persons by the accrediting council
remains to be seen.

Still, the
accreditors must know that a course in deviance is primarily concerned with any
behavior that is “outside the norm.” Sociologists who study and teach about
deviance are not really concerned with what they would call “absolutist
teachings” that are contained in how the Catechism
defines homosexuality. Rather, most sociologists are concerned with how
individuals come to define a behavior as “deviant” or “normal.” Acknowledging
that such definitions are not static, the content of a course in deviance often
focuses upon the ways in which behaviors become defined and redefined over
time. Students analyze topics ranging from promiscuity and cheating on exams to
addiction, pedophilia, deviant subcultures, organized crime, and serial murder
in an effort to understand how deviant behavior is defined and shaped by
society. For example, there is an ongoing movement within some sub-cultures to
redefine pedophilia as the more innocuous “intergenerational intimacy.” But the
general public has rejected that movementand so the “deviant” label remains
for pedophilia. Homosexual behavior is indeed a behavior that has been
redefinedand this makes it a most appropriate topic for a course in deviance
on any college campus. In fact, most courses on deviance on secular as well as
religious campuses study homosexuality, and in most textbooks on deviance
(including the textbook used in the Franciscan social work course), “homosexuality”
is the title of one of the chapters.

Of course, we must
acknowledge that some may view Franciscan University itself as “deviant” for
even offering a course on deviant behavior. While in the 1960s and 70s such
classes would be among the most popular offered, many colleges and universities
today no longer offer courses on deviance. More than 30 years ago, many
sociologists began to abandon teaching about what was once viewed as
foundational to the discipline of sociology as courses were gradually deleted
from the catalogues on many campuses. For today’s postmodern sociologists,
conceptions of deviance cannot exist in a society that has been so dramatically
changed by shifts in values, politics, and social relations. The commitment to
egalitarianism, along with a growing reluctance to judge the behavior of others,
has made discussions of deviance obsolete. No wonder most sociologists, in the
face of this juggernaut, have been disinclined even to speak of the concept of
deviance anymore. To do so would require a willingness to discuss behavior like
homosexuality in relation to standards of acceptable conduct. And defining by
consensus what is acceptable is exactly what has disappeared over the last 30
years. In the aftermath of the radical egalitarianism of the 1960s, merely to
label a behavior as deviant came to be viewed as rejecting the equalityperhaps
the very humanityof those engaging in it.

Yet, in the past,
courses on deviant behavior had been among the most popular on college campuses
because of the fascinatingand occasionally racysubject matter: the violation
of cultural norms. Courses on deviance offered an opportunity to explore how
the concepts of “normal” and “deviant” evolved over time in different societies
and cultures, and how notions of conformity and deviance can affect the ways we
live.

Students were
fascinated to learn about the ways in which the label “deviant” is “defined
down” when society no longer believes a behavior to be “outside the norm,” and
conversely, how other behaviors are “defined up,” as in the case of smoking or
drunk driving. Society increasingly deems these behaviors to be deviant. Students
study the advocacy groupsgroups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)who
have marketed a new definition of the deviance of driving while impaired and
have saved lives. Homosexuality is one of those behaviors that have been
“defined down” from a form of deviance to behavior that is now celebrated by
many beyond the gay community.

How homosexuality was defined down

An influential book
written at the close of the disastrous AIDS-afflicted decade of the 1980s
provides an understanding of how the gay community succeeded in its effort to
escape the label of deviance that threatened to attach itself even more firmly
at the onset of the epidemic. After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its
Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen,
demanded that gays realize how they were presenting themselves was the most
important structural impediment to acceptance. Applying a marketplace metaphor
to defining deviance, savvy salesmen Kirk and Madsen showed how the “deviants”
of the past could be repackaged as the “victims” of the present. They provided gay activists with a blueprint
for what they called a “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind,
and will, through a planned psychological attack.” To change public opinion,
Kirk and Madsen suggested three important tactics of persuasion: desensitization, jamming, and conversion.

Desensitization required that the gay community inundate
the heterosexual world with a “continuous flood of gay-related advertising,”
themed television programs, movies and stories that would convince the consumer
that homosexuals are perfectly normal. Learning from the success of Black
History Month, Kirk and Madsen suggested that if the heterosexual community
knew more about the valuable contributions that have been made by gays and
lesbians, they would appreciate the gay community more. Now on many college
campusesincluding Catholic college campusesthere are “gay appreciation”
months to celebrate the valuable contributions of gays and lesbians.

The technique of jamming is to use operant conditioning
procedures to move people to a different opinion about homosexuality. The
“trick” of jamming, according to Kirk and Madsen, is “to make the homophobe
feel a sense of shame whenever his homo-hatred surfaces.” In this redefinition
of deviance, anyoneincluding the Catholic Churchwho dares to question the
morality of gay sexual behavior is labeled a homophobe. Conversion occurs when techniques of associative conditioning
“subvert the mechanism of prejudice.” For Kirk and Madsen, tolerance is not
enoughrather, conversion techniques move heterosexuals into viewing homosexual
behavior as normal.

These techniques
have been so successful in converting the hearts and minds of heterosexuals
that it is now the teachings of the Catholic Church that seem deviant to
manyincluding many of those in the Franciscan Gay Alumni and Allies Facebook
group. Elizabeth Vermilyea, one of the
leaders of the group, graduated from Franciscan University in 1991 with a
psychology degree and told an interviewer for National Public Radio, “As a
lesbian and as a psychological professional, I found a couple of things offensive.…
The state of the art in science on homosexuality is not that it’s deviant. The DSMDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disordershas removed it…as an illness.”

Vermilyea is
correct about the American Psychiatric Association’s revision of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual. Responding to political pressure in the early 1970s,
homosexuality was indeed removed as a mental illness from the DSM. But that did
little to remove the label of deviance in the minds of most within the
heterosexual world. It took the major marketing campaign proposed by Kirk and
Madsen to do that.

The definition of
“deviance” in the minds of individuals cannot be removed by the stroke of the
American Psychiatric Association’s pen.
For example, in 1994, with little or no public outcry, the APA revised the
DSM so that neither pedophilia nor child molestation would necessarily be
indicative of psychological disorder. To qualify as disordered, molesters must
feel “anxious” about the acts or be “impaired in their work or social
relationships.” Despite the
“progressive” actions of the APA in attempting to remove the “deviance” label
by no longer classifying the behavior as a mental illness, few non-pedophiles
believe that pedophilia is “normal.”

Vermilyea was
joined by Gregory Gronbacher in the press release complaining about the
teaching of what they called “pseudo-science.” Demanding that “the University
aligns itself with the truth of this matter,” the press release added that
“despite more than 25 years of solid mainstream scholarship in the fields of
psychology, social work, and mental health demonstrating the psychological
health of gay and lesbian individuals, Franciscan University continues to teach
otherwise.” Yet, despite the harsh rhetoric contained in the complaint,
Gronbacher has many kind things to say about his alma mater. In an interview
for Catholic World Report,
Gronbacher, a 1990 graduate, recalls Franciscan as a “powerful, creative,
intense place of immense blessings…I continue to believe I received a solid,
quality education. I have since changed my thinking on certain theological and
philosophical issues, but this has not resulted in my viewing the university
any differently.” Although Gronbacher has left the Catholic Church, he remains
grateful for the mentoring he received from “many sincere and kind and talented
professors…Stephen Krason, James Harold and Michael Brees, and others were all
excellent educators.”

When asked if he
had been open about his sexual orientation during his years at Franciscan,
Gronbacher said: “Yes, with many students and friends and a few clergy members.
The issue of my orientation did not play a role in my classroom experiences and
was not mentioned.” Still, Gronbacher is “concerned for gay and lesbian
students who may currently be on campus and may encounter this course and
description and have it added to the possible and unnecessary shame or
alienation they may experience.”

When asked why he
chose to “go public” with his concerns, Gronbacher responded that “contrary to
the university’s assertions, we tried to contact them prior to sending the
press release. Several of our members phoned [and] emailed, and two even
visited campus. No one would speak with us. Our emails bounced. We then created
the press release, to which I was willing to attach my name as a contact
person, and sent that to the university. This prompted no reply to the issue
but did result in the university attorney threatening us with legal action if
we used the university name or logo.” LifeSiteNews reported that Franciscan
University officials said that the university was never contacted by the alumni
in advance regarding this matter.

Meeting the challenge to remain faithful to Catholic teaching

Some, like Dr. Michael Brownhost of the nationally
syndicated radio program “The Line of Fire”have framed the controversy at
Franciscan University as yet another attack on religious freedom. In an
interview with LifeSiteNews, Brown predicted that the “day may come when
religious institutions will have to seek out their own accrediting associations
because of the continuing encroachment of political correctness.”

However, it might be more helpful to try to enlist the
accrediting institutions themselves as allies in affirming the mission of each
Catholic college and universities. When national accrediting teams make campus
visits, they are charged with determining whether or not students are getting
what the institution has promised them. One of the standards that colleges and
universities are being judged by is whether they are faithful to their missions.
Perhaps it is time that national accrediting teams actually determine whether Catholic
schools are true to their Catholic identity. If Franciscan was being judged by its accreditors on
whether it is fulfilling its mission, it is likely that such an assessment
would reveal that the school is indeed one of the few dozen faithful Catholic
colleges in the country, one of a small number of Catholic colleges that have
fully implemented Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
Accrediting commissions should be noting that fact. Instead, accreditation teams are much more
focused on trendy issues like sustainability, globalization, environmentalism,
and of course, diversity.

Perhaps it is time that accreditors investigated
whether Catholic colleges are actually Catholic.

About the Author

Anne Hendershott

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, She is the co-author of Renewal: How a New Generation of Priests and Bishops are Revitalizing the Church (Encounter Books).

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